Summify: Summarize Your Social News Feeds

We are living in the era of content overload. With the rise of blogs as a professional, reliable and responsible medium that covers news, the volume of content available on any given topic has exploded and keeps pouring in by the minute. Add to it all the social network updates from friends and family and you have an absolute mess in your hands.

It’s not only becoming difficult to read all the news and updates but it’s also getting more difficult to filter them out in the first place. A piece of very useful information is always accompanied and drowned in a sea of nonsense. Summify is a web app that bravely tackles all the social noise signals to give a summary of quality content that matters to you.

Overview

Summify is a service that creates a periodic summary of the most relevant news stories, from all of your social networks and delivers it by email or via the web. Summify is free for all and currently aggregates information from Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook. You can start using the web app by submitting an email addresses and linking any one of the above mentioned networks’ login credentials.

Ease of Use

Signing up for Summify was quick eventhough it involves connecting to multiple social networks. The whole experience was elegant and painless. Once you confirm that all your accounts have been added, a status page lets you know that it might take 2 to 3 to aggregate all your accounts. To help you beat boredom while waiting for the first summary, the app suggests you to check out a sample summary or configure the way summaries should be displayed. Let us find out how easy it is to configure Summify.

Configuring Summify

The Summify Configurations page is one of the less intimidating ones I’ve seen in a web app. From this page, you can configure the frequency of updates, time interval between summaries, number of stories to be sent in each summary and set up email notifications. I particularly loved the way the app allows the number of stories one can receive per summary and the ability to receive the email summary at the exact time you specify.

From the Settings page, you can keep an eye on the progress of the summary too. A list of feeds imported from all the accounts you have submitted can be seen at anytime and you can even choose to delete some individual feeds to keep the stream clean.

Reading Summaries

Just like the rest of the web app the summaries sport a nice design too. All summaries carry a prominent time stamp and the edition number of the summary being delivered based on the interval you have set. The stories listed too are the same number you have set earlier. Summaries are generated using algorithms that put emphasis on the content your friends have liked and suggested for you.

And it works perfectly too. While I tend to sift through all the updates, however useless they might be, the summaries actually display the content I would have spent sometime to read. Each story in the summary is accompanied by the profile pics of your friends and the number of retweets and likes the particular link has garnered.

Short URLs are automatically resolved and a short description of the story with the name of publication the story is from are displayed. For getting a better understanding of the description, an image from the post is displayed as a thumbnail by the side.

To read the article, just click on the title and you will be taken to its original source. Since you have already added your social media accounts, it is possible to promote the link in your social media stream with just a single click. Also, you can access all your previous summaries received at any time.

Summify nails it with the clear cut disclaimers, notifications and timelines. At the bottom of every summary you will be notified how long you have before getting the next summary and you can change the frequency right from this page too.

Another great addition to Summify is the Featured Summaries section. In this section, summaries generated for some hand picked accounts are displayed (guess with their permission!). Popular names from the Internetverse are in the list and is a great way to take a sneak peek at what kind of content these brainiacs are into!

Final Thoughts

I was totally floored by the Summify experience. It saves a whole lot of time and picks the right stories for me. While there is the option to receive summaries via email, a mobile version would make a great addition. When Summify informed me that it might take 2 to 3 hours to import all the feeds and summarise them, I didn’t put much face value to that notification. Web apps that import and aggregate feeds say that it might take a few hours all the time, but the import is generally done within a matter of minutes.

But, at Summify it actually takes about a couple of hours to get your first summary and there is a timer indicating how long you will have to get hold of the very first summary. It’s a refreshing and comprehensive disclaimer status update, for which Summify needs to be given a credit. However, in future it would be great to get a summary delivered a bit more quickly!

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you prefer aggregating your social media accounts? Will you try out Summify?